HK’s ‘Santa’ lights up the night

LIGHT FANTASTIC:Hong Kong’s bright skyline is revved up each Christmas by a lighting expert who says the weak economy has set more lights ablaze

NY Times News Service, HONG KONG

People photograph the festive lights illuminating the Hong Kong skyline at the waterfront promenade in the territory’s Tsim Sha Tsui area on Saturday.

Photo: Bloomberg

For the past few weeks, Santa Claus, looking cheerful and surrounded by twinkling stars and ornaments, has been dancing on the sides of skyscrapers.

The images, rendered in tens of thousands of lights across Hong Kong, are varied: In one part of town, Santa is riding a dolphin; not far away, giant ribboned parcels decorate the exterior of another building, blinking many floors above the ground.

Chinese culture adores lights and the Hong Kong skyline has some of the biggest, brashest and most colorful in the world — all year round. Shop fronts, signposts, entire buildings are lit up — some with undulating and flickering effects — as the sun sets each evening, enveloping the entire territory in an orange glow.

However, this time of year, the spectacle ratchets up several notches. Out come vast, multicolored, complex designs that span many floors and make Rockefeller Center in Manhattan and Oxford Street in London look dim by comparison. Frolicking reindeer, bobble-hatted snowmen and enormous Christmas trees adorn dozens of buildings, sometimes to startling effect.

The man behind many of these images is Terence Wong, who trained as an electrician and once did stage lighting work for theaters.

Thirty years ago, Wong was asked by a Hong Kong property developer to add a bit of seasonal pizazz to a new complex of office buildings in Tsim Sha Tsui East, an area that was then off the beaten track. He has not looked back.

“It is my passion,” Wong, 54, said in an interview in his office, which is filled with files and lighting accessories. “I never want to stop.”

The first job involved simple stars suspended from the tops of buildings. Over the years, Wong has made the displays ever more complex, as he and his workers have learned how to affix strings of light bulbs to the glass facades of buildings using window-cleaning platforms.

The displays, typically cost between HK$20,000 and HK$100,000 (US$2,600 and US$13,000), depending on the size and intricacy of the image, Wong said. Yet for many building owners, sprucing up exteriors is as much a part of the holiday season as tree lights are for operators of shopping centers or private citizens in Western cultures.

Downturns in the economy, do not prompt building owners to hold back, Wong said. When an epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) hit Hong Kong in 2003, causing tourism to evaporate and the economy to buckle, building owners actually spent more on the displays, he said.

Likewise, spending this year has not changed, even though the Hong Kong economy, hit by the global downturn and slower growth in China, is estimated to have grown just 1.2 percent this year. That is down from 4.9 percent last year and 6.8 percent the year before that. The displays are typical of the resilience in consumer spending in Hong Kong, where unemployment remains low — 3.4 percent, the latest Hong Kong government figures show.

Light displays are deeply ingrained in Chinese folk culture. Lanterns have been objects of artistic expression and status symbols for centuries, as have the elaborate fireworks displays that feature in major celebrations to this day. In the same vein, prominent buildings are brightly lit all over China at night, often changing colors every few seconds, while light shows are a popular form of public entertainment.